I feed wild finches and over the last month or so I’ve been watching them die little by little.

I’ve been grieving over the deaths of my beautiful birds and, though I feed them in trays on the ground, there’s dog shit around the area. Yesterday I realized that it’s probably been the dog shit that’s been killing them. They’ve had to tramp around in dog shit. I wept and screamed about it all the way home from a meeting I was at. When I got home I promptly picked up all their dishes in a tub so as not to spill any of the seed on the ground; brought them all in the house; washed them and put them outside on the other side of the yard where the dogs don’t shit. But it’s pretty much too late for the birds. Most of them are already dead. I’m so so so sad. It really really hurts.

I used to be very suicidal and this sort of thing could have very well been the catalyst to push me over the edge. It put me in that amount of grief. But today I’m no longer that way. I’m no longer on the suicidal merry-go-round. How did I get off that machine? I’m a suicidaholic and I don’t attempt suicide one day at a time… no matter what. With that attitude I’ve been forced to get better – or else suffer in great, great agony from my own torturous thoughts.

Since I didn’t try to take my life over this, here’s what happened next.

I talked to my friend Kathy about it and she said that she had a book on grieving pet loss now which she’s just starting to get into counselling about. She gave me a copy of the book to read and we’re going to get together to work on this. God has my back – as usual.

He’s coming through for me. He loves me and is taking care of my pain.

Thank you Pops.

(and God said)

I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.

Joel 2:25

I’ve had it hard for many years of my life but for a while now, actually since a couple of years after I put the suicide down, life’s been good to me for the most part. I have my up’s and down’s as most do but it’s nothing like it used to be.

In the midst of this heart-ache with the birds, today, this is the sort of thing with my friend Kathy that I pay more attention to. God coming through for me in the form of her help.

I want to talk about the ‘torture’ I mentioned above. Ever since childhood I had developed a very bad habit of thinking. I would nurture all the bad aspects of life and pass over all the good. If it was bad it warranted much attention but if it was good it didn’t warrant even a second’s thought. I had a laser focus for nasty.

This business with the birds is an example of how ‘cherishing the good and passing over the bad’ works for me. I don’t ignore the bad. Grief has to be addressed and dealt with until it is healed. But I don’t cherish it or nurse it like I used to. However, learning this new way of thinking was a long slow journey of baby steps from out of the blackness into the light. One small step of ‘cherishing each good thing like it was a rare coin’ at a time. Today, it’s a habit running so deeply in me that it’s become a part of my personality. I am no longer a suicidaholic. Not in the leastest, tiniest, littlest bit. Today, I can easily live life on this planet, not for just weeks, or months, but for decades – ‘for the long haul’.

The first step in this process of becoming suicide-free was, for me, from God giving me the heave hoe about stopping the suicide attempts. He told me “NO MORE!!!” And I knew in my heart that I was not going to be allowed to die no matter how hard I tried. Death was going to be outside my reach until He decided it was time for me to go. I no longer had any say in the matter. But I now believe that you don’t need an act of God to get to this step. Just like you don’t need an act of God to put down the drink. I think that putting down the weapons of suicide is the exact same thing as putting down the drink. It’s done one moment at a time – abstinently. You make it ‘just not an option’ anymore no matter how much you want to imbibe. And with that attitude you have to grow in spite of yourself. Eventually it will become a habit and you will become comfortable not doing it. To get comfortable you will find you are forced to make ‘attitude adjustments’ (as I’ve described above) in order to gain this comfort-ability. But making these attitude adjustments are as hard to do as changing the course of a battleship with a small rudder. It took me a tremendous amount of time and effort to overcome my family of origin message installed in me from when I first learned how to think.

To my dear sober AA friend,
(excerpts from a letter I wrote to my friend Stewart)

While I was on vacation I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time sitting on the sand dunes where I read and did some writing. The writing started to pick up faster and faster until I was going at it at a furious pace. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I gathered together in words some of the things I’ve come across in my sober journey. In 30 years a lot of stuff’s come across my desk but most of it just whirls around in my head – there’s been no solidity. So I decided to try to create a holding place for some of this stuff. To get it more clear in my own mind and to share via paper with others if they care to know. This way I won’t be cornering them but at the same time get a small sense that I’m contributing.

I’ve been free of flour/sugar products for over two years and cigarettes for over one and a half years and I haven’t lost any weight at all. It’s been very discouraging to say the least but I think the tide is finally turning regarding the weight. I think God finally had enough of my wining and stepped in to give me a little advice.

I had a spiritual experience a couple of weeks ago about losing this weight. It went something like this.

God: You know how to lose this weight dear.Me: How?God: You know how.Me: No I don’t.God: Yes you do. You’ve done it two times before the in exact same way with complete success.

EXERCISE !Twenty minutes a day.

God: One time just before you moved to Santa Cruz. And one time while you were in Weight Watchers. It worked like a charm back then and there’s no reason why it won’t work again this time. So… if you really do want to lose this weight… why don’t you…

Get back on the ball.

Well I’ve been doing cardio-exercise (which is what I did before) on the elliptical machine twenty minutes a day since then.

I know I will lose the weight this way. God is right. If I want to lose the weight, I have to exercise. I’ve experienced losing the weight this way two times before. I really do want to lose the weight. Enough so that I don’t have any resentment about doing the exercise anymore. I used to have a big resentment at doing even ten minutes. I’ve always talked myself into this resentment by wining things like…

How come I have to exercise to lose weight and everyone else doesn’t.

But when God talked to me that day, I knew instantly what a load of crap that was. He put on my heart the reality that just about everyone who has a slim figure has to exercise… the same as I would if I wanted a slim figure too. Suddenly, doing twenty minutes a day on the elliptical is a piece of cake. Not only did He give me the information I needed to loose the weight, but He took all my resentment about doing the exercise, away too!

My baptism was ‘not that great’ as it turned out. This is an understatement. Here’s what happened.

I became a Christian in my bedroom, alone, by accident, at 27 years old. The story of my conversion is HERE. Then I was a ‘closet Christian’ for three years before I got with a church. After that, it took another year or so before I got the guts to come forward and ask to be baptized. I knew about baptizim, and I knew you were supposed to get baptized after you became a Christian, right? It’s just something that Christians were supposed to do. You get baptized to declare to the world that you now follow Christ. I had no problem with that. I knew I belonged to Jesus and to God and that I owed my very life to Him.

Life is like a fast moving river filled with spinning logs. We spend our lives frantically leaping from spinning log to spinning log trying to stay afloat. Mentally, emotionally, physically, we leap.. and leap… and leap. But God lives in the calmly moving depths of the water between the spinning logs. How did I connect to Him there in the depths? How did I stop frantically leaping from spinning log to spinning log to get to Him? The answer… one time I stopped leaping. It sounds impossible but one time I sat down on a log and gazed into the water to look for Him… and I found Him there and saw Him return my gaze. It was marvelous. The spinning logs be damned, this is where I finally found peace. I stopped the constant leaping from log to log, and as I sat down on the log I found that it stopped spinning. I sat down for a time and gazed into the water, and He helped me with the constant spinning. And all I did was just sit down.

When I am quiet in the morning I imagine the love of GodHe is the FatherHe wears a long heavy cloakHe draws me to Him~ gently ~~ slowly ~~ tenderly ~~ sweetly ~He enfolds me into His heavy cloakI lay myself against His chest I am ~me~ I am accepted I am ~me~ I am encouraged I am ~me~ I am warmI am ~me~ I am safeThis is my Father’s love for meI can stay here for hours.Talking with Him.I never want to leave this place.

It is my belief that the above passages infer that every person (and not just Christians I might add) on planet earth carries a piece of our holy creator within themselves. From the president of the United States to the people who call the streets their home… everyone carries a piece of the Holy God… an image of Him… inside their persons (however, those who heed God’s call to Jesus the saving Christ, have a soul redeeming relationship).

What if you’re a Christian… and you have Attachment Disorder… what do you do… with God?

I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous a very very long time and I have a lot of time without alcohol. I’ve tried to follow the ‘program’ for all I’ve been worth but have been a miserable failure at it. The only thing I’ve managed to do… by hook and by crook…sometimes by the skin of my teeth… is to not drink.

Up to the age of 27, I had never encountered what people call… Love. My parents didn’t know about it, nor could they recognize it either. In fact, they came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as Love. There was no Love in my childhood and when I became an adult, I was savage enough that, even if I did happen to come across it, I wouldn’t have recognized it if it had come and kissed me on the cheek. I ran away from any kind of closeness others might have wanted with me. By the time I was adult age, the only feeling I had for others was… fear… even terror.

(sorry this is so long – I couldn’t make it any shorter and still say what I needed to say).

I’ve been out in the field with God for a long time, but have taken many long, long ‘breaks’ (through various addictions) from my studies. Though I’ve been freed from alcohol obsession for 34 years, I’ve been substituting many other secondary addictions to take it’s place. I could not stop these other addictions myself, so I’ve been praying, for all my sober 34 years, to have these other addictions removed. With all my heart, I’ve wanted “No other gods before God”.

Jesus wants us to be without pretense when we come to him in prayer. Instead, we often try to be something we aren’t. We begin by concentrating on God, but almost immediately our minds wander off in a dozen different directions. The problems of the day push out our well-intentioned resolve to be spiritual. We give ourselves a spiritual kick in the pants and try again, but life crowds out prayer. We know that prayer isn’t supposed to be like this, so we give up in despair. We might as well get something done.

Because of childhood abuse and a vicious attack, I have been dealing with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in therapy since my 20’s. I am in my 50’s now. But in November of 2010, my God (whom I call Papa; Pops for short) stepped in and released me from something attached to this PTSD, that was transforming.

A post, by the author of “Follow His Light“ inspired me to write my own experience with this.

* * *

I am a sheep.

I used to be a ram, but now I am a sheep and I am glad to be one. I grew up in ramsville and was taught the ways of ram-hood by father and mother. Dad and mom were gods, and they told us… all their children… we were to be rams.

My father was a powerful, powerful, undiagnosed, mentally unbalanced man. In fact, even to this day, I have never met a more powerful human being on this planet.

When I was a little kid he used to twirl me around by my arm like a helicopter and beat me while screaming stuff at me. I don’t remember what the stuff was he screamed at me because I was terrified I would be killed =accidentally= by getting my neck broken.

Along with many, many others, this is for my blogging buddy: Graeme
who writes posts that inspired me to write this.

A warning. This is very base. It was difficult to write; difficult to expose. But I felt led to write it and publish it because I think it’s necessary for others to understand how deeply Father-God loves us. His love for us goes deeper than we could ever, ever comprehend.

I'm Michelle. This is my blog. I write about women and fatness, expound upon semi-coherent thoughts I have in the middle of the night, and offer tough love to those in whom I am disappointed; they are legion.